/home/nand

Edit: new ones:

I’m not an artist, ok? The website look where will go the logos, for reference.

And the most annoying bugs :

Still on the road to the Ubuntu idea braistorming and most annoying bug websites, here are some more artwork contributed by thorsten: the “image links”. These images are supposed to be posted on various websites and forums to support an idea/bug and ask for votes.

You remember the old days when it was the websites that were deciding what you should use? “Best viewed in IE 5.5 in 1024×768″, or even worse the ones that were refusing if you didn’t had the browser of their choice? Yeah I know, a few websites still have these restrictions, but usually it is legacy stuff that they are working on to remove. With the rise of alternatives browsers (mainly Firefox) and alternatives OS (mainly Mac OS, yes, not Linux yet!), nowadays are the days of the interoperability. IT people are supposed to catch the trend and offer relevant solutions. That’s what we see … but not always. Bad luck for me.

Incompetent IT staff from a brand new ISP I now use, DartyBox (founded in 2006 IIRC) decided that their IP TV offer should be broadcasted on… IE in XP/Vista with WMP only! Not only does it limit your “choice” of OS, but it also limits you choice of browser! And I really wonder what they were thinking by offering their TV service on a browser… Absurd. On the opposite, a very good solution from their ISP competitor Free offer their TV service on VLC. Cross platform, no TV-on-browser oddities, perfect!

One funny thing while I was trying to get this working on VLC (unsuccessfully) :

** (.:16387): CRITICAL **: gtk_pizza_set_size: assertion `pizza != NULL' failed

I really wonder how taste a GTK pizza

It’s the end of the holidays!

Since the end of my courses in Singapore in November, I traveled in Japan, came back to France in Vaugneray, near Lyon, to see my family, and entered a state of deep laziness (well, almost) before actually starting to work. And I just moved yesterday to Paris, a city I don’t particularly know and like… yet? And as the world is always smaller that we think, I met on the flight David Clavel, who was going for his internship on distributed systems at Google in Mountain View, California!

My internship will be in a much smaller company called Substantiel. They are selling computers, called Ordissimo, based on Debian that target people who have difficulties to learn new technologies. I’ll have various tasks on the low-level software-hardware interaction (drivers,…), an area that interests me much.

On the way to the Ubuntu idea brainstorming website and the Ubuntu most annoying bugs website, we reached another step : we got the logos! Thanks to Thorsten again.

Idea brainstorming logo:

(svg here)

Most annoying bugs logo:

(png here, svg here)

As mentioned before, I recently “discovered” the Ubuntu art team, and all the talents and potential inside. It’s a wonderful place where creativity is unleashed, and new really nice theme ideas are coming up every day on their wiki and ML, on the road to a new default theme.

Unfortunately it seems this potential is far from being used. It is wasted! Why? As pointed recently in this thread, team members feels there is a lack of leadership. Artists post theme mockups, get some comments from various other people, but no indication on what’s wrong, what’s right from the Canonical people in charge. As a result, without feedback from the “client”, their effort is stalled, they can’t fix things.

To me, it is a shame! So much creative energy is wasted…

Several times I have wished I had much more artistic skills. An beautiful and appealing UI can make a difference! Look for example at K3B: this is a real pleasure to use this app! But unfortunately, I can only struggle to do some basic graphics…

Luckily enough, some artists are around, e.g. in the Ubuntu art team, and when they start to work, it’s awesome. I asked some days ago on their mailing list for help to design a logo. One of them, Thorsten Wilms, quickly gave me this sketches, then the next day one mockup of one I choose, and finally this final result the next day. Awesome!

Kudos to him and the team!

And of course, happy new year!

I just got through the Ubuntu art team mailing list, and I should say : Whoah! What traffic! And what nice mockups! I’m really confident we will have an awesome new theme for Heron!

Here one of the best I have seen (from Thomas L.G in this post, http://www.portefolje.net/div/mockup.jpg) :

Edit: Sold/Vendu!

(Sorry, french only!)

Après un 4L Trophy 2007 fort d’émotions, l’année précédente à la bricoler, et l’année d’après à rouler tous les jours avec, je m’en sépare Et oui, malheureusement il se trouve que j’ai mon premier job à Paris, et je n’aurais plus le temps de m’occuper et d’utiliser ma 4L autant que je voudrais. Donc je vous fait la description de la bête:

4L TL 1989 956cm^2

• Décors désert et chameau, par Nessé, artiste à Grenoble.
• 140000 km (il faut que je verifie, c’est dans les alentours)
• Deux phares sur le toit, commande sur un tableau de bord customisé. Attention! La galerie sur le toit n’est pas à moi, je ne la vends pas avec.
• Sonde de temperature de liquide de refroidissement et indicateur sur le tableau de bord (tres utile!)

• Ajout d’un second ventilateur de radiateur, activable manuellement sur le tableau de bord. Possibilité de forcer la mise en route du premier.

• Redirection de l’entrée d’air du moteur à l’interieur de l’habitacle avec filtre supplémentaire. Protegez votre moteur du sable, prenez l’air dans l’habitacle!
• Pièces changées:
  • Pompe a eau (préventif)
  • Changement du joint de culasse, et autres joints annexes. Les courroies aussi. (préventif)

  

  • Changement du thermostat (préventif)
  • Deux pneus neufs à l’arriere. (préventif)
• Controle technique OK du premier coup (juillet 07). Vous aurez donc pas à le passer!
• Quelques pneus fournis.
• Un bon carton de pièces diverses et variées.
• Poste cibi avec son antenne. Pratique sur l’autoroute pour discuter avec les potes.

• Enceintes 4.1 installées dans la 4L. Oui, et du bon! Attention! Prevoir de changer le transfo 12-220V, le mien, un premier prix, est sur le point de mourir.
• Ordinateur de bord! Oui! Ecran tactile, il fait office de lecteur MP3. Pas forcement pratique, un petit baladeur mp3 est eventuellement à prevoir pour le remplacer.

• Plaque de protection: je peux vous passer photos et explications pour en faire une pour 60 euros (et encore, j’ai pas optimisé les prix).

• Et en prime, mes conseils sur les pieces critiques pour le trophy

Bon, tout ca, c’était les bon points. Mais comme je suis honnete :), voici les mauvais points:

• Le point d’attache de l’amortisseur arriere gauche a cédé pendant le 4L Trophy, a cause d’une fausse manip de notre part. A noter que cela ne nous a pas empeché de rouler pendant quelques centaines de km. Cela a été ressoudé, nous avons roulé la fin du trophy avec, je roule tous les jours depuis un an avec, et ca a passé le controle technique. Donc a priori, ca ne vous empechera pas de finir le trophy mais c’était à préciser.

Voila voila, je vends la bête à 1000 euros, jetez vous dessus! Je suis sur Vaugneray, à 20 km à l’ouest de Lyon. Me laisser un commentaire si interessé, avec email, je vous enverrais alors mon numéro de téléphone.

When packaging, the debhelper (dh_*) tools are both wonderful and awful. Wonderful because they easily handle almost every case, in a very neat way. Awful, because when they don’t work, have a few spare hours ahead!

I’ll share my experience with some private libs, it may be of some help for others. I have a source package that leads to two binary packages. One contains a daemon and some privates libs, the other contains a GUI client. The warnings were “dpkg-shlibdeps: Impossible to find a package for libike.so.2.0.3″ and then “dpkg-shlibdeps: Impossible to find the dependencies of libike”. This would then lead to a missing dependency between the two binary packages.

Ok. Why is it trying to find a package for the lib I am currently building?? The man page was no help. After a few hours of search, I found a notice inviting me to see the dpkg-shlibdeps man page in the very latest version of dpkg-dev. Ah yes, much more clear!

Basically, dpkg-shlibdeps works in two steps. It first list all the required libs for the executables, and then for each lib, it searches to which package it belongs, using dpkg -S and the shlibs files. And here was my problem : I had removed the call to dh_makeshlibs as I thought it was not necessary because the libs are private. But in fact you still have to generate the shlibs files : the debhelper tools will take care to put them in the binary package only if the libs are public.

Yay!